A riot of colour T


First sunday supplement proved to be controversial, says Jonathan Sale


he innovation was not universally welcomed: ‘suddenly, there was a scream of horror, followed by shouts of rage, followed by a clatter of dustbin


lids.” When Hunter Davies shared his entertaining reminiscences at an NUJ freelance branch meeting about his career at The Sunday Times, he did not mention the morning of February 4 1962 nor the horrified old lady in the flat below his. Nor did he refer to the pair of sugar tongs with which she gingerly picked up the loathsome colour section and then dumped it in the rubbish bin. He was seeing the reaction of many readers


whose Sabbath had been ruined by the launch issue of this vulgar comic that was lurking like a cuckoo in the nest of their respectable copy of The Sunday Times. Being a reporter on the ‘steam section’ (as the trendy magazine staffers dismissively referred to the main, black-and- white newspaper), Davies could plead not guilty to any involvement with the gaudy newcomer; it was just as well that the lady downstairs would not have guessed that one day he would be the fourth editor of this add-on which changed the (type)face of British newspapers. The future held 12,000-word features on genocide – and articles by Jilly Cooper. The first cover of this groundbreaking publication displayed 12 shots of model Jean Shrimpton in a Mary Quant dress taken by her boyfriend David Bailey and its contents included a Robert Carrier recipe for stewed oyster. Yet these delights did not save the day: “The Sunday Times issued an apology the following week because it was such a disaster,” recalls Magnus Linklater, the third editor. Looking back at the early copies with benefit


of 10 years of hindsight, Mark Boxer wrote:“I found them curiously disappointing, safe mostly.” And he had been the launch editor. The magazine lost a million pounds in its first year. On the bright side, the readers who had


cancelled were more than replaced by the 12 | theJournalist


quarter of a million new readers who were drawn in by the only colour in a black-and-white Sunday world. The magazine chronicled and became a conspicuous part of the Swinging Sixties. Lord (Roy) Thomson had started it unashamedly as a vehicle for advertising and, encouraged by the fact that ads made up the 60 per cent of the pagination at then enormous rate of £3,000 per colour page, he held his nerve. So too did the editor of the paper itself, who


was known as ‘the brigadier’ because he was, in fact, a brigadier (well, actually a lieutenant- colonel).


George Perry, who joined a few months after the launch, pays proper credit: “Denis Hamilton was a tremendous overall editor. If readers complained, he said: ‘It doesn’t matter what they think – they will be enlightened. Our job is to give them what they don’t know about.’ ” Always a restless soul, Boxer flew the nest he


had constructed after a mere three years and was replaced by Godfrey Smith, aka Godders. Hamilton moved upstairs two years later. Harry


Ideas man boxed clever


MARK BOXER, the editor of the inaugural issue of the first UK colour supplement, was ahead of the curve to the point of being early for his own funeral. When he was


rusticated (suspended) from Cambridge for publishing a poem in which ‘God’ was rhymed with ‘sod’, he had a mock funeral procession escorting him to the station.


Having made his


name as the cartoonist ‘Marc’, he joined and redesigned Queen (later Harper’s & Queen). Oddly enough, he was


not the first person to be appointed editor of The Sunday Times colour section (as it was called).


This was John Anstey, who took ages to come up with dummies; these were not liked and he left without producing a single issue. He later became the launch editor of the Telegraph’s colour mag, so his dummies must have improved. Lord Thomson, the


proprietor of The Sunday Times, then found Boxer exactly the man to get the ball – and the presses – rolling. Boxer was an ideas


Evans moved from The Northern Echo to The Sunday Times editorial chair. Later to be Sir Harold, he was a serious, campaigning journalist and looked askance at the louche lads and lasses of the magazine. They in turn looked to Lord Thomson, for whom they were soon making a fortune, to watch their backs. “The golden age was in the 60s and 70s,” says George Perry. “A period of paradise,” agrees Philip Norman, one of the star writers. “The magazine was completely irresponsible.” In a good way, he adds: “They sent me round the world.” He once remarked when I was dropping in my freelance copy that there was a novel to be written about the goings-on at the magazine and, a quarter of a century later, he wrote it. Everyone’s Gone to the Moon featured in The Journalist’s recent round-up of classic journo yarns. It is a wickedly humorous tale of the struggles between a young provincial journalist (like Norman, say) and his editor who bears no resemblance to, er, Evans. “If the novel paints Harry as the villain, that’s


how we saw him,” says Robert Lacey, who, in addition to his day job on the magazine, started work on Majesty, his authoritative book on the Queen. “Evans’ genius lay in allowing units like


person, who got others to execute them. “The visual image


moved him,” said his successor, the late Godfrey Smith, “but he appreciated good writers or ‘wordies’ as he liked to call them, and knew intuitively how to mix the two. “Pencil thin,


meticulously dressed, dark hair – a younger and more refined edition of Rex Harrison. He lived on the front edge of life.” Boxer’s second funeral


– the real one – came when he was only 57.


TIME LIFE PICTURES


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28